What It's Like to Be a Madam for the Richest Men in America

Jami Rodman, 38, was raised in a conservative Christian household and later became a Las Vegas escort known as Haley Heston after getting divorced at 22. She started as a stripper, which she claims she wasn't good at. That progressed to going out on "paid dates" with men at strip club events, which eventually led to her becoming an independent escort. She later started her own high-end escort agency, which she ran as a madam for about three years, until she was outed when a Smoking Gun exposé revealed that former Olympic runner Suzy Favor Hamilton was an escort at the agency. Rodman, who is now attending college full time, released a self-published book in December called The Las Vegas Madam: The Escorts, The Clients, The Truth. She told her story to Cosmopolitan.com.

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In Las Vegas there are several different ways you can work as an escort. You can be an independent, or you can work through VIP hosts or casino hosts. What they do is they'll have clients come into town or have clients gambling on the table, and they need girls to join them. The VIP host acts as a broker. It is illegal, but we all know what happens in Vegas. The casino hosts are not employed through the casino or the hotel; they're independent contractors. Then there are call agencies, which are the "girls direct to you" 1-800 numbers. You see the billboards everywhere, the guys flipping cards on the strip. Those are very large call agencies. They send out all the girls that are on shift that night. They get a lot of business, but they're not very good for customer service or long-term business because the girl negotiates a price for each act. She comes in the room and wants at least $150 because that's the agency fee, and then everything that happens on top of that she splits with the agency.

Then there are madams and pimps. A pimp normally controls all aspects of the girl's life. When a girl comes to him, she's sometimes working at a strip club or is a runaway or is a new girl who is friends with one of his current prospects. He'll groom her into being an escort. [Pimps] do [prey on them]. They put her up in their house so they can control her. Some of them use drugs to make the [girls] more dependent on them. They all have different ways of grooming them.

[Madams are different.] In Vegas, a lot of the women who madams work with are a lot more established in their personal lives. Maybe they have a career, a family, or they have children. A lot of them have been in magazines like Playboy or Maxim. They're sort of established in their home life and the madam acts as a dating mechanism. [The escort] will look to the madam to do the screening, and to handle the marketing and promotion. A lot of them don't want their face out there or they can't risk the exposure of being an escort, so the madam will broker dates. A lot of the clients are long-term regulars, so the madam knows the client very well and she knows the escorts very well, and she tries to match up personalities and expectations.

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Guys who use madams usually need to maintain a high level of discretion because they have careers and families. It's a mutual brokering between all three of them. With a pimp, nearly 100 percent of [the escort's] money is going to him, but with a madam, my fee was 20 percent, but some madams charge up to 50 percent. The money goes to the girl first and the girl has to pay for the madam's services.

At the top of my game, I easily made $3,000 a day. That would be about three clients, sometimes one, sometimes four, but by the time I got to the last guy, I couldn't remember the name of the first.

I started out as an escort. I pretty quickly got burned out because I didn't budget my time wisely. I was partying all the time, I was working all the time, and I started seeing more regulars as sugar daddy experiences. It was very difficult. Clients come [to Vegas] to drink, let loose, forget about their problems at home, and they hire an escort because she's his party partner in crime. He doesn't want to hire a girl who is going to go on a date with him and say, "No, I can't have that shot with you." We're with a client, and we have one drink and another drink, and then maybe we have another client to see after them. So then we have a drink with them. And then maybe there's a bachelor party or a club date later on that night. So now there's five or six more drinks added on to the ones from earlier. Then that club date will go to an after-hours party and before we know it, it's 2 p.m. the next day and, oh my god, we have to go to work again. The drinking and the partying really doesn't stop. Bars and clubs don't close. For me, I got really addicted to drugs and drinking and partying, and I just had to put everything in storage and go to Europe for a few months to clear my head.

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At the top of my game when I was escorting, I easily made $3,000 a day. That would be about three clients, sometimes one, sometimes four, but by the time I got to the last guy, I couldn't remember the name of the first. That's when it started to really feel like work and less like a fun time. Now I know that some women see many more clients per day—the trafficked ones commonly see 30 guys a day. So it's hard for me to complain.

Sometimes escorts do make the decision to risk a bad review or piss off a client because she doesn't want to put herself at risk of an STD or make out with someone who smelled like he just ran a marathon. The good escorts find a way to politely diffuse the situation without making the client feel bad. He's human, just like we are, and things happen. I never wanted to ruin someone's day or take a bite out of his self-esteem. Who knows, he may be on his last legs before committing suicide, and hired an escort to try and feel better. A million things could be going on.

On the other side of it, there were clients who hired escorts because they had a vendetta against women and wanted to take out their anger. He knew she would be in a vulnerable position because he could write a bad review. The review boards, although they're a great way to increase business, also put escorts at a disadvantage. There really isn't a way for an escort to give her side of the story.

I was full-on escorting for maybe three years and had sugar daddies a couple years, then got into a pretty serious relationship and pulled away from the business. I had stopped escorting and was running an art business. All of a sudden, we had the recession hit and that really knocked my civilian business down because people were not spending money on art. I started escorting again and very quickly started dating a client. He was an attorney and the escort agency was his idea. He helped me start it, and drew up all the paperwork and all the disclaimer forms. I was running both businesses at the same time and then pretty fast the escorting agency just shot through the roof. I didn't escort at the time because it was very hard to run a business like that plus escort. To keep that escort agency going, I really had to work 24 hours a day for at least a year. I had two or three cell phones, and was always taking calls.

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At the busiest point, there were 60 women in the agency. When I first started, it was just six or seven of my personal friends who had been in the industry for a while. And then they would bring their friends on. I did screening and marketing for them, but they were responsible for their own success. If they only wanted to work once a week then that was fine with me. If they wanted to work three times per day, that was fine too. After a few months of being on the [underground escort online review] boards and talking to other girls, word got around that this agency was doing really well, I was great to work for, I didn't charge exorbitant rates, so they started coming in from all over the world. There are a lot of girls who work on tour and they travel to all the big cities. Vegas was a hot spot because it's always busy and it's cheap to visit. If you're a working girl and you go to Vegas, you can make money. There's not really a down time. There's somebody looking for companionship at all hours of the day and night.

Obviously prostitution is not legal in Las Vegas. But there are a lot of "dating/modeling" agencies and it's well known that these places are providing companionship. What happens between two consenting adults in the privacy of the bedroom isn't any different than two adults going on a regular date. There were disclaimers and forms that were signed stating we were not condoning prostitution or offering sexual services for money. All of that documentation was covered. It's clear that that's what goes on but it's not blatant, like, "OK, I'm going to go in and give you a blow job for x amount of dollars." We're going on a date.

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The really wealthy guys have seen and done just about everything, so they were looking for something different and new.

It was so much different as a madam because I was running a business, which means I was paying taxes. I paid an assistant, and I paid for photo shoots every month, and anywhere from 40 percent of your income goes to marketing. When clients were not happy, we offered a discount because that's customer service. That discount would come out of our profits. If I was in business for money, I never would have run an escort agency. I was making connections and making the industry safer for both sides of it.

I screened clients. One of the standard protocols is that he will provide references to other escorts he has seen in the past. I would look up the escorts he claims he's seen and then I would email her and say, "So-and-so provided you as a reference. Do you recall meeting with him and was he a safe gentleman to see?" As a courtesy, she will reply back and say, "Yes, I remember seeing him, he's fine," then I check him off the list as being safe to see. Some girls will go so far as to require his real name, or ask him to show her his driver's license when he gets there. If he doesn't have any references and he's a brand new client, then we'll call his place of work and just pretend to be someone like a dry cleaning [company], and say, "Is so-and-so there? His dry cleaning is ready to be picked up."

Running the agency, I've had models call me from the bathroom of the suite or restaurant, panicking because the client was her boyfriend's friend or her sister's fiancé—that does happen! It was a lot trickier as a business manager because clients had higher expectations of professionalism, and diffusing problems in a more diplomatic way under pressure was a daily occurrence.

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We get power moguls, oil sheiks, celebrities, the simple grandpa who lives in Ohio. A lot now require a non-disclosure agreement. That's pretty standard. A lot of very wealthy high-powered men who own massive companies and are on the Forbes 500 list [have booked escorts with me]. It's a lot of moguls that are ridiculously wealthy that are flying in 10 of their best friends for a blowout at the top floor of the Bellagio. It wasn't uncommon that once they got to know them, they would pick girls up in their private jet and fly them to New York for the night, then fly them back.

We had a younger guy who always wanted girls to dress up like superhero characters. We had some clients who were into electric shock, both giving and receiving, or labia and scrotum weights. Diaper play and mommy play was common with that side of the industry. And mummification with industrial sized reams of saran wrap.

I never offered scat play or golden showers. Some girls eat specific types of fruit on request and laxatives before their appointment, and guys would want to watch them or even eat it. More common than scat play is golden showers, both giving and receiving. Guys want to lie in a hotel shower and have a girl piss all over him, or vice versa. Another girl I knew was requested to save her period blood for a client and he would drink it. The really wealthy guys have seen and done just about everything, so they were looking for something different and new, something to take them one step further.

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The crazy parties were the bachelor parties. Everybody has certain tricks, like pulling pearls out of their crotch or lighting their nipples on fire.

The girls really did charge their own rates. Some were $500 per hour, some $600 or $1,000. Obviously if you're charging $1,000 per hour, you're not going to be working three times a day like someone who charges $500 per hour. The crazy parties were the bachelor parties. Bachelor parties in Vegas have got to be over-the-top flamboyant. A lot of women got involved in bachelor party performances and they had to get more outrageous as time went on because you're competing with so many women who are doing the same thing. Everybody has certain tricks they do like sex shows or pulling pearls out of their crotch or lighting their nipples on fire.

When the agency got busted [by the Smoking Gun exposé], that's when I knew I had to quit. The risks were just too high and I didn't know if I was going to have someone beat down my door. I had pimps that were threatening me, I had PIs leaving cards on my door, and I never knew when the reporters were going to show up. Where do you pick up after doing that for so long? I had to move out of the city.

I spent a lot of money at first, but eventually I started saving. Now I live a very normal life. I'm a full-time student, I don't go out and shop, and I'm not drinking and partying and flying all over the world, so my expenses are a lot different. I removed myself from that environment. I live in a pretty normal suburb in California. I'm a senior undergrad in international studies.

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When I ran the agency, I was working all day, everyday, and getting phone calls in the middle of dates, in the middle of having sex. I was a horrible partner. As an escort, if I'm having sex all day with clients, the last thing I want to do is go home and have crazy, wild sex with my boyfriend. Maybe I am very sexual in one part of my life, but there's a sacrifice and that is when I'm in my downtime, I just want to chill. It's tricky to find someone who first of all is not intimidated by past experiences and who understands that you're just a normal person and there are going to be ups and downs. I've been in a long-term relationship for a while, but I wouldn't call it a traditional relationship. At this point I don't even really know what traditional is.

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